science
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Fission Product Barriers
Reuters is reporting that a Ukrainian attack hit the reactor dome of reactor #6 at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). The article is very clear that radiation levels at the plant are stable. This is exactly what I would expect of any attack short of a bunker-buster style bomb. The containment structure is engineered to…
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Space Weather
We now go live to Ollie Williams for the weather. What’s the weather looking like today, Ollie? So, this is only tangentially connected to nuclear power, but space weather is a thing and can impact the power grid. Earlier today, the earth was hit by a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with an X class…
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Why So Many SCRAMs?
I was reviewing the NRC event reports for the last few months and noticed several reactor trips. The normal average is one trip every two years or so. I did not go back and see if in this recent spate of trips any of the units involved were exceeding that rate, it just seemed like…
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How Much Radiation is Too Much?
Thanks to @nuclearanthro.bsky.social (check out his blog https://deusexatomica.wordpress.com/), we know that a contractor at Los Alamos National Lab accidentally exposed 4 colleagues to radiation while conducting an experiment with Cf-252. The dose ranged between 132 mrem and 195 mrem. As with so much of life, those numbers are meaningless without context. To start, the measure…
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Running Out of Gas
Nuclear power plants can run a very long time without needing more fuel, but not forever. That would make it a perpetual motion machine, and if you figure that one out you are now a billionaire, so congrats. Every 2 years or so, they have to shut down and replace some of the fuel so…
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Oh, no! The Reactor is (prompt) Critical!
All bad nuclear movies have that scene where someone shouts “God help us, the reactor is critical!” Every nuclear trained person’s favorite bit of pedantry is to correct people who use the term critical to describe an out of control reactor. Actually, a critical reactor is one where the neutron chain reaction is self sustaining.…
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Happy New Year! Now, about that earthquake . . .
Since late 2019, it seems like there has been a string of years where things just keep getting worse. 2024 decided to continue that trend by having a magnitude 7.6 earthquake in Japan on New Years Day. Understandably, people get nervous when big earthquakes hit Japan. The nuclear accident at Fukushima happened almost 13 years…
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Spent Fuel Storage
One of the main concerns people have over nuclear power is what to do with the fuel after it has spent time in the reactor. This used fuel still emits significant heat for years afterwards, and is highly radioactive for centuries. Nuclear fuel spends about 6 years inside the reactor. Every 2 years, nuclear power…
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Technical Specifications
Nuclear power plants are required to comply with the conditions of their NRC-issued license at all times. A large part of this is contained in what are called technical specifications, also known as Tech Specs. The link to all currently approved Tech Specs is below. https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/licensing/techspecs/current-approved-sts.html Tech specs provide a box that you have to…
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Nuclear Power 101
When Einstein discovered that a small amount of mass can be converted into enormous amounts of energy, he set the stage for nuclear power. The first reactor was built under the squash courts at the University of Chicago by Enrico Fermi. It went critical on December 2, 1942. By Melvin A. Miller of the Argonne…
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